Drinking the Drink
If we talk the talk and walk the walk, do we drink the drink? I believe I do. My relationship with alcohol is a strange one. Like most people, my awareness of alcohol significantly predates my consumption of it. Also like most every kid, I snuck a sip or two of beer, wine and even the hard stuff when I was young. I had just enough to know that I didn’t like any of it. That is to be expected with a kid’s pallet, but my pallet didn’t change much as I went into adolescence. As for my influencers in life, I can remember my mother one time coming home from a work party in Costa Rica when she was drunk and it seemed very strange to us. In some ways it humanized an otherwise driven and serious-minded parent, but I can distinctly remember my sisters and I considering it a strange event and a not particularly good thing. It never happened again, so it was quickly forgotten. She had a perfectly fine way to get our attention by eating what we considered gross stuff like pickled herring and liverwurst, so that she didn’t need to shock us with a lot of drinking.
When I was twelve we moved to Maine in the deep of a winter blizzard. The social center of the Inn where we were staying was the oak bar and the bartender was the master of ceremonies. It never occurred to us to sneak drinks and were well satisfied with a splash of grenadine in ginger ale to make us feel like we were joining into cocktail hour. When we moved to Rome when I was fourteen, we took the Italian Line’s Michelangelo from New York City to Naples for a seven day crossing. It so happened that it was a common way for many returning expatriates to head home to Rome, so there were a number of families with kids my age onboard. As we passed out of New York Harbor, we were invited to join the Captain for a cocktail party to celebrate the start of the cruise. Being novice cruisers, we actually dressed up for the affair (or at least my mother and I, who shared a cabin together, did). I have a picture of myself wearing a blue sharkskin suit with a white turtleneck adorned with a faux silver chain with a peace symbol. It was 1968 after all. That shot also shows me sipping on my first real cocktail, a Manhattan, ordered in the spirit of the day. My mother felt that it would be appropriate for me to be formally introduced to alcohol on an international cruise manned by Italians, who were not much for drinking age formalities.
That cruise was eye-opening not only because of the lax drinking age, but also because it was basically one huge 24-hour a day open bar. The next six days were a blur for me and I don’t properly remember whether I drank a lot or little and whether it was wine, beer or hard liquor, but I was certainly exposed to the drink with a gang of kids my age who would be in school with me in Rome in the coming weeks. I managed to avoid any conflicts with my mother and family on the theory that they knew I couldn’t go too far on a boat. That ended on the last night (actually the last morning) when I rolled into my shared cabin at about 3am. My mother was awake and waiting for me. I was about 5’9” at the time and that made me 5” taller than her already. When I came in she reached up and grabbed me by the jaw so she could smell my breath. I guess I passed the test, which meant that I had been more about carousing than about drinking at that point in the wild week. As she castigated me for my late arrival I must have back-talked because she went to smack me (something she rarely did, but it had happened once or twice) and I remember that I blocked the shot. That stopped her in her tracks and she just sent me her best motherly dagger eyes and told me to go to bed.
I spent the next three years of high school with zero peer pressure about drinking. My sister Barbara was the family social butterfly while I spent my time buying, fixing and riding motorcycles all over Rome, Italy and Europe. Barbara’s gang was into Rock and Roll and recreational drugs, but I don’t recall lots of alcohol. In my gang, the issue of drinking simply never came up, motorcycling and alcohol not being good bedfellows. I always assumed that the lax and casual relationship Italians, and Europeans for that matter, had with wine and other alcoholic beverages, was the reason for this overall non-event.
When I went off to college, I was seventeen and technically not of legal drinking age, but given my larger than average size, I was rarely challenged or carded in the environment where most college students were street-legal for a beer. I think had the twenty-one year old limit been imposed in 1971 rather than 1984, there would have even more craziness around drinking. Fraternity parties were mostly beer fests, but I rarely drank any. One time, my Italian instructor joined us and our class at the Chapter House for a few pitchers of beer. That may be the one and only time I recall feeling tipsy as I toddled off to the men’s room.
After business school and having joined the ranks of New York bankers at the tail end of the three-martini lunch trend, I made a tactical decision to “fit in” to my new bankers role. Since my business involved significant client entertaining, I decided that NOT drinking would be a career liability, so I followed my leaders into the realm of drinking scotch and soda. The scotch to drink was Dewars, so Dewars it was. They say that scotch is an acquired taste and sure enough, I began to like the taste of scotch better than any other alcoholic drink, including beer or wine. But after a few years and a few too many Dewars ( I never got drunk), I just decided that I didn’t enjoy drinking enough to do it. I was also becoming more confident in my abilities to the point where I didn’t need to court favor with my superiors or peers. So, I just stopped drinking. I wasn’t being dramatic about it, I just stopped and learned quickly and easily to address the issue to co-workers with a joke that I had enough vices already. And here’s the funny thing I learned. No one really cared. It was easy.
And now, all these years later, I continue on my path of near-temperance. I occasionally take a champagne to toast a special event. I even once in a blue moon order a scotch and soda, just on a lark and perhaps to shock someone on a lark. My drink of choice is diet soda. Sometimes to create the semblance of having a cocktail, I will order cranberry and ginger ale. Recently, I was at a golf club and heard someone order a Tiger Woods. I had heard of an Arnold Palmer (ice tea and lemonade), but not a Tiger Woods. What came was a blend of Diet Coke and .lemonade. It made sense to me on several levels. So suddenly, that has become my go-to drink of choice. It has started more than a few discussions to be sure.
I feel sorry for people who cannot control their use of alcohol. I don’t get it, because I can’t imagine liking alcohol or it’s affect on me to that extent, but I do understand excess and how it can happen. As for people who drink regularly and enjoy the hell out of it, but manage to stay within bounds, I may understand that even less. But I equally don’t understand people’s love for coffee, so I suspect this is more my failing than anything strange in others. There are few commitments and lifestyle decisions I have taken and stuck to in life, but drinking the drink is one I have. So, if you hear someone ordering a Tiger Woods, smile and think of me and what might be the only temperate thing about my life.